I can tell by various web metrics that you guys are not interested in the Afghanistan story. You should be and I am going to parse it today anyway. It is one of the advantages of being non-profit that I write what I want and you can read it or not as you like. But really, you should be following this war.

AP reports that: “A truck filled with explosives that police believe may have been destined for Kabul blew up on a highway Thursday, killing 25 people — more than half of them children walking to school.”

US commanders are now thinking Afghanistan may need 270,000 soldiers to keep internal peace, not just the 134,000 that NATO is now committed to training. The goal might be 400,000 police and army altogether. Not only would the training and standing up of such a massive force cost rather more than the some $7.5 bn. a year the Obama administration had budgeted for Afghanistan, it is hard to see how the Afghan government could afford such a huge security force. It would likely cost several billion dollars a year to maintain, and Afghanistan’s whole annual budget is only a little over a billion dollars a year (the gross domestic product is only $9 bn., and a third of that is probably from poppies made into heroin.) These plans doom Afghanistan to be a welfare queen in the world community for decades, and they also risk throwing the country into more violence, not less, since its fractious tribespeople have never dealt well with having a strong central government (Afghanistan is not like Iraq, folks).